Tetris for iPhone review

One of the few classic and truly mobile games, Tetris, gets an update by Electronic Arts for use on the iPhone and iPod touch. We take a look.

by
Peter Cohen
, | 25 Dec 08

Should I buy Tetris for iPhone?

Expert's rating:

We still have one grumble, however. The game costs £4.99, which reflects the going rate for other “premium” games from major publishers at the App Store. We’d like to see the price drop a bit more – perhaps to £3.99, which is what Tetris for colour-screen iPods costs.

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Tetris for iPhone
full review

Tetris on the iPhone and iPod touch puts the devices’ touch interface to good use – you tap on the screen to rotate pieces and slide your finger downward to make pieces fall into place faster. It’s colourful and bright, easy to view and fun to play. There are two play modes: Marathon, a non-stop game that keeps ramping up the difficulty, and Magic, which features different special items that help you get through each stage.

When Tetris first went on sale in the App Store it was flawed and we couldn’t recommend it so didn’t review it. In the ensuing months we’ve seen some updates to both the game itself and to the iPhone software, and now we’re happy to report a very different experience when playing the game.

We originally thought that Tetris was one of the most trouble-prone iPhone gaming experiences. We admit that Apple’s iPhone 2.0 software update was plagued with similar problems, but it seemed that Tetris was more prone to exhibiting those problems than other apps we’d downloaded, and it looks like we were right: EA Mobile updated the app to fix that problem. Sound cut out when we originally looked at the game, but that doesn’t appear to be an issue anymore: sound effects and music were all fine in this release.

EA Mobile’s support website remains a bit of a mess. You have to register to ask a question, unless it’s one of the canned FAQs posted to the site. But we’re happy to see the company update its site to take the iPhone into account – it wasn’t that way when we first checked back in July.